School can be a difficult place for children with Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder. Demands to sit still and focus on facts can seem insurmountable for otherwise bright and creative kids.

But a free camp for ages 11 to 15 aims at nothing less than changing the physiology of the brain by teaching the kids how to think.

The approach may help all kids, even those without learning differences.

The program, offered as part of a research project at the Center for Brain Health at the University of Texas at Dallas, teaches abstract reasoning skills. Instead of “teaching to the test,” or pumping kids with answers to questions that might be asked on exams, instructors ask questions designed to get children to interpret or analyze the main concept of the material they are studying.

Dr. Sandra B. Chapman, the center’s founder and director, and Dr. Jacquelyn Gamino, a cognitive neuroscientist on the staff, published a paper in Frontiers in Psychology in December illustrating their program’s effect on a sample of 54 kids in a public middle school. The study showed that children in their program outperformed a control group drilled in rote memory strategies.

Gamino runs the SMART camp, which is funded by the Sparrow Foundation. SMART stands for Strategic Memory and Reasoning Training.

Adolescence and early adulthood are the key time for the development of the frontal lobes of the brain, which support higher cognitive functions, including problem-solving, reasoning, judgment and planning, she explains. Poor frontal-lobe development, which may be an issue for ADHD students as well as those with traumatic brain injury, can mean a greater risk of academic failure. The SMART program can help strengthen the frontal lobes by teaching kids how to learn, she says.

“The brainwaves look very childlike before the program and more developed afterwards.”

It’s soon clear observing the campers in that this way of learning is new to them.

A lot of whys, but not many whos, whats, whens or wheres emanate from the instructors, who smile encouragingly as they prod the children to think about why a character in a short video made a particular choice.

When a child describes a plot in a story, program facilitator Janet Koslovsky nods and says, “Those are the details. Now give me the big picture. Why did he do it?”

When the child explains why the character did what he did, Koslovsky beams. “Your frontal lobes are going to be swelling after this!”

Thirteen-year-old Andrew Champion of Dallas says he did not know what to make of it when his mother brought him to the center.

“I was pretty mad the first day,” he admits. By the second day? “I liked it a lot,” he says. “It’s fun.”

Even so, Andrew seemed unsure on the third day when Koslovsky showed the class a short animated film about a robot who finds a dog that can’t walk.

Andrew and the other campers had their notebooks open to the page where they were supposed to write down the story’s gist.

As some campers scribbled busily, Andrew seemed distracted. He noticed aluminum foil behind him and tore off a piece, folding it until he turned it into a bracelet for his hand. He fingered his rewards jar — each camper has an identical one filled with coupons for doing good work; they will eventually be able to redeem those coupons for prizes.

The page stayed blank. Gamino, noticing, walked behind him.

She probed gently, pausing for answers after each question. “What do you think the robot is feeling toward the dog? What did the robot decide to do? How did that affect the robot?”

Andrew, concentrating, put his answers together slowly.

“The robot sacrificed a part for the dog because he felt love for the dog. He felt compassion.”

He hesitated again.

“How do I write that? Do I write what I just said?”

Gamino nodded, beaming.

After everyone reported on their answers, Koslovsky said, “Want to do another one?”

Andrew’s hand was the first to shoot up.

“Yeah!” he said.

Although this camp is primarily for research purposes, the center hopes the findings will lead to new ways to teach all kinds of kids.

“We believe that children that learn concepts can do any problem because they have the tools,” Gamino says. “We teach them to connect the dots.”

The Center for Brain Health is offering one more SMART camp this summer, July 11 through July 21 with limited spaces. To participate, parents must bring children in for a preliminary assessment to determine their eligibility, and then sign a waiver allowing the results to be used for research. Campers must commit to the entire nine-day session. Visit www.centerforbrainhealth.org.

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About Nancy Churnin

Nancy has covered children's theater since 1999, when she became a full-time staffer for The Dallas Morning News. She added children's health to her beat after becoming the paper's Healthy Living writer. Before that, she served as theater critic in the San Diego Edition of the Los Angeles Times, from 1986 to 1992, writing a weekly column and winning two San Diego-area press awards in back-to-back years for Best Arts Feature. She interned at Newsday in 1980 and was a regular contributor to San Francisco Magazine in the early 1980s. She is also a member of the Writer's Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild dating back to her work as a staff writer on the hit television show Happy Days.

Hometown: New York City

Education: Nancy has a B.S. cum laude from Harvard University, where she wrote for the Harvard Independent, and an M.S. from Columbia University's Columbia School of Journalism, where she was a Jacqueline Radin Scholar. She is a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science where she served as editor of both the school's Science Survey and Biology Journal.